Film times & brief film reviews

Movie times are good from Friday, Apr 6 through Thursday, Apr 13 except where noted.

Opening This Week

ARE WE DONE YET?—To ask the question is to know the answer. A remake of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, with Ice Cube in the Cary Grant role. Rated PG-13.

Days of Glory—France's nominee for the 2007 Best Foreign Film Oscar, this estimable, classically mounted wide-screen war epic (original title: Indigenes) attempts to right a historic wrong in dramatizing the story of North African Arabs who fought heroically for France in WWII, then were abandoned in the racist post-war period. Wisely avoiding the shaky-cam naturalism of many French movies, director Rachid Bouchareb constructs his engrossing film with elegant compositions, fine performances and, eventually, a sure sense for the sudden horrors of action; the result combines the virtues of old-school Hollywood war films and Saving Private Ryan with a quietly impassioned sense of historical injustice. Rated R. —GC

FIREHOUSE DOG—Sure, we love firefighters and we love dogs, too. Something tells us, however, that we will not love this movie. Rated PG.

GRINDHOUSE—Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez team up for a double-bill tribute to the drive-in schlock of yore. Be ironic, very ironic. Rated R.

THE REAPING—Hilary Swank plays an uptight ex-missionary turned research scientist whose main goal in life is to prove that God, the Devil and modern-day miracles don't exist. Her test-tube world turns upside down when a mysterious man beckons her to solve the mystery of his backwater Louisiana town where a river has turned into a red vat of sticky blood upon the death of a child. Scientific Swank points to fisteria as the cause until the town's cattle begin to wretch vomit and keel over, boils bubble up on necks, lice scamper through hair and swarming locusts swoop down from the skies above, making this film the biggest Biblesploitation film to hit the big screen in years. The filmmakers resort to shlocky camera tricks to elicit jumps from the audience while ripping off every faith-based horror flick in the past 50 years. If you've seen The Omen and Rosemary's Baby, then don't waste your time: You've already seen this film. Rated R. —KJ

SHAKALAKA BOOM BOOM—Rocking upstart Upen Patel goes All About Eve-y on music chart topper Bobby Deol. Set in New York but filmed in Johannesburg, Shakalaka Boom Boom looks like a mind blowing campfest starring a hero past his sell-by date and a British-Indian model keen on posing his way to the top of the Bollywood heap. Life imitates art? Not rated. —LB

Current Releases

300—Directed by Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead) as a cinematic adaptation of Sin City author Frank Miller's graphic novel 300, this film attempts to retell the story of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., where a force of 300 spirited Spartans fight off a million man march of pillaging Persians. But Snyder gets lost in the eye-popping details of Miller's pulp fiction world—the historical context becomes muddled as the film turns into a school boy's fantasy of a romanticized militant society and ends up as little more than a green screen's wet dream. 300 takes the cake in the realm of visual excess: It's a smorgasbord of mangled limbs, stone-cold skulls and blood splatters set up squarely against sexed-up images of warriors with abs of steel, excessive piercings and a few naked breasts and orgy-rific bare bottoms. Rated R. —KJ

AMAZING GRACE—Director Michael Apted commemorates the 200th anniversary of the law banning the slave trade in the British Empire with a hagiography of abolitionist MP William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd). Apted takes an important historical episode and sets it inside an echo chamber of parliamentary brinkmanship and guilty white hand-wringing with barely a mention of the sober economic, sociological and political arguments offered in defense of, in hindsight, an indefensible industry. Rated PG. —NM

BLADES OF GLORY—Will Ferrell channels the same dim-witted, bloated buffoon he's played in most recent films as Chazz Michael Michaels, a sex-obsessed, leather-clad figure skater. Joining Ferrell is Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite), who plays the Dorothy Hamill-haired rival, Jimmy MacElroy. Making fun of Olympic sports may be just fine, and a bevy of figure skating icons are on board but sometimes the film breaches the line of campy fun by exploiting gay stereotypes for an already sexually-anxious teenage set to laugh at and mock. Rated PG-13. —KJ

GHOST RIDER—Daredevil writer/director Mark Steven Johnson tops himself, and not in a good way, by adapting another B-list Marvel superhero into an overwritten, overwrought film. Rated PG-13. —ZS

THE HILLS HAVE EYES II—Wes Craven may have been king of low-rent '70s grindhouse horror, but this sequel, co-written with son Jonathan, knocks him squarely off that hallowed throne. Directed by music-video maven Martin Weisz, this blood-spattered follow-up to the somewhat substantial 2006 remake is visceral and crude, relying more on scenes of smashed brains and severed limbs than a concrete plot, ultimately causing the film to lose the militant mettle of its previous post-nuclear dialogue and cash in on formulaic, phoned-in horror tricks. The hills are still full of vengeful, murderous mutants but the apocalyptic parable has vanished into thin air and replaced by anti-war propaganda from a comatose Craven. Rated R. —KJ

THE HOAX—Depicting author/con man Clifford Irving's nearly successful 1971 campaign to have McGraw-Hill publish a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes, this flashy but deeply unsatisfying drama's problems mainly stem from the producers' decision to a hire a hot young screenwriter, William Wheeler, who invents countless episodes and thereby trashes the film's capacity for incisive truth-telling. A modicum of compensation comes in director Lasse Halstrom's deft handling of a fine cast led by Richard Gere and Alfred Molina. Reviewed on page 56. Rated R. —GC

THE HOST—This South Korean hit about a dysfunctional family trying to rescue the youngest member from a giant prawn/tadpole thing created by pollution is a funny, subversive, genuinely scary treat. See it now before the inevitable American remake. Rated R. —ZS

THE LAST MIMZY—Two children, Noah and Emma (Chris O'Neil and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) find a mysterious puzzle box washed up near their lakeshore home. They fiddle and play with the mysterious objects inside, which includes Mimzy, an ominous stuffed bunny which purrs like a Tribble. Ultimately, spooky Emma, played by the accomplished Wyrn, takes center stage. A trippy meld of Tibetan Buddhism, nanotechnology and Alice in Wonderland, The Last Mimzy takes some unexpected turns (at least for those unfamiliar with the 1943 source work by Lewis Padgett), has a welcome message of environmental activism and thankfully eschews potty humor, condescension and kid-lit clichés. —LB

THE LIVES OF OTHERS—It is no coincidence that German writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck sets this socio-thriller about repression in Communist-ruled East Germany during the year 1984, as the German Democratic Republic was the literal fruition of an Orwellian dystopia. A secret police agent (Ulrich Mühe) engaging in warrantless searches and surveillance finds redemption through exposure to an embattled playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend (Martina Gedeck). Donnersmarck crafts a sublime, somber and visually subfusc portrait of a modern-day police state and its timorous citizenry, who carry on as people they are not in obedience to a spurious nation-state. Rated R. —NM

THE LOOKOUT—It takes chutzpah for an already acclaimed screenwriter such as Scott Frank to set a sublime script within a well-worn genre like the "heist flick," make it his directorial debut and still produce a cinematic gem. Erstwhile high school golden boy Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) lives with the effects of a post-car crash brain injury until a former classmate (Matthew Goode) recruits him to help rob the local bank. This intelligent neo-noir boasts a superb cast, especially budding star Gordon-Levitt and Jeff Daniels as Chris' blind roommate. Rated R. —NM

MEET THE ROBINSONS—Vacillating between unbearably saccharine and insufferably frantic, the latest dud from Disney Feature Animation is a bit of CG-sigh. Lewis, a precocious 12-year-old orphan/inventor looking for his birth mother, meets young stranger Wilbur Robinson, who whisks Lewis into the future in a time machine to track down the dastardly Bowler Hat Guy, a Snidely Whiplash clone and the film's lone highlight. Rated G. —NM

NAMASTEY LONDON (HELLO LONDON)—Thoroughly Westernized London brat Jazz is hastily married off during a holiday in India to Arjun, a Punjabi farmer after her father discovers her British boyfriend. Weirdly resembling a lame Bollywood version of The Namesake, with its tension between immigrant parents and assimilated offspring, Namastey falters with its off-putting characters. Just because the script says you should care about these people doesn't mean you can. This is a rom-com breakdown in any language. Even the delightful Akshay Kumar can't save this one. Not rated. —LB

THE NAMESAKE—Gogol Ganguli is mortified by his first name, a mark of his Indian parents' eccentricity. What possessed his father to name him after his favorite author, the Russian Nikolai Gogol? Gogol struggles to decide what's meaningful to him amidst the masala of his suburban American life and his family's stubborn Bengali traditions. Director Mira Nair and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala's richly textured adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's novel is unusually faithful to the book's spirit, a meditation on how the most meaningful personal rebellions sometimes have deeply conservative roots. See review on page 52. Rated PG-13. —LB

PREMONITION—A plot-driven, vaguely moralistic blend of The Sixth Sense and Memento destined for endless repeats as the FX Sunday Afternoon Movie, Premonition stars Sandra Bullock as a housewife who finds herself living the days before and after the untimely death of her husband (Nip/Tuck's Julian McMahon) out of order. The film offers a fairly brutal set of punishments for contemplating adultery, not putting up safety stickers for your kids, and worst of all, losing faith. Apparently, in the movies, not believing in God gets you a one-way ticket to the Twilight Zone. Rated PG-13. —ZS

PRIDE—The textured tableau here is evocative of Charles Stone III's recent slices of African-American life, but the film gets bogged down once it wades into the deep end of the melodramatic pool. Rated PG. —NM

REIGN OVER ME—That Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle) is drawn to his ex-dental school roommate Charlie's (Adam Sandler) awful plight out of concern is understandable, since Charlie lost his wife and children to Sept. 11. But, for Alan to somehow envy Charlie's tragedy-fueled independence is absurd. In this film, 9/11 loss is propped up as justification for a mentally deranged man-child's selective boorish behavior. However, when writer-director Mike Binder suddenly casts Charlie as a metaphor for America's fractured post-9/11 psyche, is only adds insult to illogic. Rated R. —NM

SHOOTER—Occasional references to WMD, the 9/11 report and Abu Ghraib add a dash of zeitgeist to the thriller's early goings, but once Danny Glover's Defense Department heavy and Ned Beatty's Cheney-esque U.S. senator start mumbling and stumbling around, the entire spectacle devolves into a flaccid, left-wing wet dream. With Mark Wahlberg. Rated R. —NM

TMNT—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Say no more. Rated PG.

THE ULTIMATE GIFT—One of the more able recent offerings from the Fox Faith Movies brood. Rated PG. —NM

WILD HOGS—Not so much bad as painfully pointless. Rated PG-13. —NM

Some new movies open this week on Wed. Times are subject to change, and we recommend calling ahead to confirm.

Fishmonger's Film Forum: Wed, Apr 11, 6:30 pm: A selection of popular festival shorts, plus two new short films by local filmmakers. Fishmonger's Restaurant and Oyster Bar, 806 W Main St, Durham. 682-0128.